Argosy Films, Canadian Film Development Corporation, Crown International Pictures, 101 Minutes

Review:

“This man’s dangerous. This little joyride he’s on is undermining the entire balance of this country.” – Hawkins

Even for 1984 standards, this movie is of such poor quality that I was surprised to find out that this was released theatrically and not just made for TV as a CBS “movie of the week”.

The film stars Lee Majors and Burgess Meredith as two dudes way past their prime but unable to get rid of their youthful tendencies.

The Last Chase takes place in a dystopian future where crazy environmentalists rule society and have outlawed vehicles. Majors plays a former race car driver that has been secretly building a new race car in his garage for twenty years. Burgess Meredith plays an old man that used to be a fighter pilot back when jets were still in use. Majors and some teenage sidekick take his race car on a cross country joyride that angers the fascist government, who then sends in old ass Burgess Meredith to catch these speed demon criminals in a fighter jet.

Does the premise sound awful? It should, because it is.

So Meredith hunts down Majors, shoots at him and we get an elderly vehicular duel with a bunch of unnecessary non-action scenes thrown in to break up the tension that doesn’t actually exist in this picture. I’m not sure what the point of this movie was but at least I finally got to see a Penguin fly.

Anyway, this was featured on the original first season of Mystery Science Theater 3000 and this isn’t one of the films that the revisited once the show went national on Comedy Central. That’s probably because it bored Joel and the ‘Bots to tears the first time.

Rating: 4/10Pairs well with: Death Race 2000 and Cannonball, both of which are much, much better than this.

“Two days ago, I saw a vehicle that would haul that tanker. You want to get out of here? You talk to me.” – Max

The Road Warrior is a good example of a sequel being better than its predecessor. Some people might disagree but this was the best version of a Mad Max film until 2015’s Fury Road was released. But this is, in my opinion, the best of the original trilogy that starred Mel Gibson.

The world is pretty much destroyed in this film. While we saw a world on the brink of collapse in the first picture, by the time we get to this one, the world has been reduced to nothing but desert, as least as far as we know.

With that, the two most sought after commodities are water and oil. But here, oil is basically gold as those who can still run their machines, have a strong advantage over those who can’t.

The story sees Max discover a community that has a good amount of oil but they are being threatened by a vicious gang that looks more like barbarians than normal, well meaning people. The evil gang, led by Lord Humungus, keeps the community trapped behind their walls as they use their vehicles to run down anyone who comes outside. Max strikes a deal with the nice people being terrorized and we see him have to take on these vile villains in the most high octane way possible.

The Road Warrior is both barbaric and fantastical but still grounded in a sort of gritty reality. It came out just before the ’80s sword and sorcery trend took hold and while it has strong similarities to the genre, it doesn’t rely on magic and monsters but instead, machines and human monsters.

The movie feels otherworldly but not in a way that it doesn’t seem plausible or reflective of a possible future for humanity. Coming out during the Cold War, regardless of this being an Australian film, adds a natural heightened sense of fear. George Miller made something that effectively tapped into those societal and political concerns while also making just a badass action movie that has aged well, despite its weird fashion sense. But that ’80s punk meets new wave look also gives the film some of its charm.

While the film certainly doesn’t need to rely on Mel Gibson, his inclusion here adds and extra level of gravitas and personality to the picture. But I also have to give some credit to bad guy character actor Vernon Wells, as the mohawked savage Wez.

The Road Warrior is capped off by a twenty minute action finale that sees the greatest vehicular chase scene in cinematic history for its time. And frankly, it’s only really been upstaged by it’s later sequel Fury Road. I could say that maybe some movies have had better car chases but what gives this movie something special is how there is a variety of weird vehicles from cars, trucks, motorcycles and even a gyrocopter.

I love this movie. It’s one of the top action films of the ’80s and arguably, all-time. It’s simple, it’s tough and it gets the job done while surprising you along the way.

Rating: 9/10Pairs well with: all the other Mad Max films, as well as other post-apocalyptic car and biker movies, most of which were ripoffs of this.

“Now Paul, you… you believed in these drugs. And, you rebuilt this man. And you did put him back out on the street. But now, he’s out there killing people. And we can’t have that. Now you find him… and you fix it” – Man with Cigar

Nightmare is an Italian slasher film shot mostly on the Florida Space Coast. Sadly, this isn’t a slasher picture that takes place at NASA but how cool would that have been in the ’80s? Like SpaceCamp meets Friday the 13th. I would’ve loved that shit.

Anyway, this primarily takes place on Cocoa Beach but there are a few New York City scenes as well.

The story follows a psycho that has been released to the public, he goes down to Florida and tries to fight his killer tendencies but he can’t. This all ties back to a horrific event from his childhood.

The film is far from spectacular but it is a good example of extensive gore used in a way that has some actual artistic merit to it. The gory scenes are very well done and as tasteful as they can possibly be. Yes, it is absolutely gratuitous but it feels like there is actual purpose behind it and it serves to have meaning to the plot and to character development. You’ll see what I mean when you get to the big reveal (a predictable one) at the end.

I can name dozens of slasher films that are better than this one and there isn’t a ton of killing but for whatever reason, this one does stick with you and it stands out, as it doesn’t try to emulate or blatantly ripoff other films in the genre, it explores different territory making it fairly unique. Also, I’m a Florida boy and I love the setting.

Strangely, being that this is an Italian film with a slasher premise, it doesn’t tap into the giallo style too much. The only thing remotely giallo, besides narrative similarities to that style and slasher films, is the vivid look of the blood once it really starts flowing. I think the director was more interested in trying to make something much more American feeling than replicating other, more famous, Italian horror directors. Kudos to him for that.

This film has characters named Radish and Wildman in it. What’s not to love, right?

Final Exam is one of the seventy dozen slasher films to come out in the early ’80s. It is also one of the most forgettable. It tries to be several things at once but fails at all of those things.

This is a film with multiple personality disorder. It wants to be a teen sex comedy and also wants to be a clone of everything better than it in the slasher genre. It doesn’t meld the two things together very well and it doesn’t do either of the two things very well either. It’s not funny, not scary and the biggest crime against it is that there is barely any blood in it.

Another problem with the film and I’m not sure if it’s an attempt to be artistic or just pure laziness but the slasher has no backstory, no name, no real motivation that you’re ever made aware of and looks generic as hell. He’s just some dude that looks like Javier Bardem in No Country For Old Men but severely deficient in coolness.

The dumbest thing in this entire film is the sequence where some frat bros stage a fake terrorist attack on the school in an effort to create a distraction so their other frat bros can cheat on their exams. Seriously, these doofusauruses roll up onto the university lawn in a van and start machine gunning people and then steal the corpses of their victims. Of course, none of this is real, as the corpses come to life, laughing their asses off in the van. It’s a bizarre scene that just comes off as random nonsense that contributes to the overall nonsense that is this stupid movie.

Final Exam sucks. I love slasher films, even really bad ones, but this is such an awful pile of shit that the flies would rather commit suicide than hang around this massive mound of crude excrement.

Rating: 3.25/10Pairs well with: Other college/school themed slasher pictures of the era: The Prowler, Graduation Day, Night School, The Dorm That Dripped Blood, Black Christmas, The House On Sorority Row and The Initiation.

I haven’t watched The Prowler in a long time but I did like it enough to rent with some regularity when I was a kid in the ’80s and ’90s. I also thought that “The Prowler” had a really cool look. The best slashers always have a cool outfit and a unique gimmick. This is the same reason why I love the bad guy in My Bloody Valentine. Like that movie, this is a film that isn’t spectacular but is made better by having a cool killer.

The film starts with a prologue that takes place in the 1940s. It is used to setup a connection between that time and modern times (or 1981 when the movie was released).

As is typical, someone is murdering young hot girls. It’s a big mystery and the murders are gruesome. You’ve probably seen this all before, maybe dozens of times, and there isn’t much to set this movie apart from its competition but slashers are rarely great and fans of these films don’t watch them expecting to experience a masterpiece like Alfred Hitchock’s Psycho.

Compared to some other films in the slasher genre, this one is a bit tame. Yes, there’s stabbings and gruesome murders but this is nowhere near as gory as some of the harder stuff out there. It certainly can’t compete with something like the Spanish slasher Pieces.

Surprisingly, this was a one and done slasher picture and didn’t churn out a bunch of sequels. But I guess that this early in the genre, studios were more into just making slasher pictures in general and not developing franchises. Friday the 13th only had one movie when this was made and A Nightmare On Elm Street was still three years away. The early ’80s were full of these one and done slasher pictures.

There isn’t much else to point out with this movie other than mentioning that it had two classic film-noir actors in it: Farley Granger and Lawrence Tierney. Modern film fans probably know Tierney best as Joe Cabot, the mob boss, from Reservoir Dogs.

Rating: 6.5/10Pairs well with: Other early ’80s slashers: The Burning, Pieces, My Bloody Valnetine, Terror Train, New Year’s Evil, Happy Birthday to Me, The Mutilator, Sleepaway Camp, The House on Sorority Row, The Initiation, etc.

“Mr Bond! We can do a deal! I’ll buy you a delicatessen! In stainless steel!” – Blofeld

This used to be my least favorite Roger Moore James Bond movie and because of that, I hadn’t watched it in a really long time. Having revisited it now, I’m not sure why I considered it so low. I actually enjoyed it but maybe that’s also because I hadn’t seen it in over a decade.

I guess what I like about this is that it feels more serious than Moore’s other Bond movies. Don’t get me wrong, I love the Moore era cheese but this showed me what he was capable of had his scripts been a bit more refined and less campy. And while this does have some campiness, it’s not there to greet you with a wide smile every five minutes. This is action heavy and some of the moments in the film have serious consequences. The tone is similar to the more serious Connery pictures or the Timothy Dalton ones that came later.

The big dune buggy battle on the beach is pretty intense and it leaves you with a similar feeling of loss as the painful and emotional ending of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Granted, it’s nowhere near as impactful as that but it does parallel that situation in some ways and it shows that this chapter in the Moore era isn’t just a live action cartoon.

This film also calls back to the Connery era with its underwater scenes that feel like they’re straight out of Thunderball. These scenes look a little more polished however, as it’s been over fifteen years since Thunderball was released.

Also, we get Connery’s big bad guy in the opening sequence of this film. We see Ernst Stavro Blofeld return and pretty much get killed off, as he wouldn’t return to the series until the modern Daniel Craig era. This was probably due to the studio losing the rights to SPECTRE after the Connery films. This was Eon’s way of killing SPECTRE and frankly, everyone was clamoring to see Blofeld finally get his just desserts after mysteriously disappearing from the series before Bond was able to get some proper revenge.

One cool thing about For Your Eyes Only is that the villain is Julian Glover a.k.a. Walter Donovan from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and General Veers from The Empire Strikes Back. I’ve always been a big fan of Glover and he has been a villain in three of my all-time favorite franchises. He is pretty tame as a Bond villain though and isn’t as memorable or gimmicky as some of the more famous baddies but he had a good presence in the film nonetheless.

I also really like the young ice skater girl. Sure, she was a bit annoying and too young for Bond but I found her charming and entertaining. Kudos to Lynn-Holly Johnson for bringing her to life and making her a character that contrasts her more famous role in Ice Castles. My mum loved Ice Castles, I was tortured by it as a kid. That and The Cutting Edge. My mum loved friggin’ ice skating movies. She said Slap Shot didn’t count though, even though I pointed out the skating skills of the Hanson Bros. on numerous occasions.

Back to the topic at hand, For Your Eyes Only was a Bond film that I wasn’t super fond of. But it’s moved up the mental list stored in my head and maybe I should update the list I posted on this site awhile ago.

Rating: 7.25/10Pairs well with: The other Roger Moore James Bond movies.

“You never can tell on a day like this – things could be goin’ jake one minute, then, presto – before you know it, you’re history.” – Vance (narration)

Man, oh, man… what a cool movie.

I can’t believe that I have waited this long to actually watch The Loveless, as it is Willem Dafoe’s first film, as well as the directorial debut of Kathryn Bigelow (alongside Monty Montgomery, who has done some really cool shit as well).

The film is essentially a character study of two people: Vance, a motorcycle riding ex-con, and Telena, a young girl from a very small town who has a horrible, abusive father. Things change for both Vance and Telena when they come in contact with one another and two people who feel like standard archetypes, evolve into very human and complex characters.

I guess what really made this film work is the subtlety of the storytelling. It didn’t need to spell everything out for you. It just played out and the emotions of the characters were pretty clear. Sadly, the film leaves you with an incredibly tragic ending but despite Vance appearing like a real shithead, you felt for him. You also really feel for Telena and her fate is a real punch to the gut.

In its simplest form, this is a movie about an ex-con biker gang that rolls into a small town, pisses off the townsfolk but refuses to budge or put up with their Podunk bullshit.

Dafoe’s Vance is a well layered character who you feel has something of real significance to offer the world but he is a victim of his own flaws that is uncompromising to his detriment.

His gang is mostly made up of actual shitheads but I liked Robert Gordon’s character and it was cool seeing him in this, as he’s a musician I have listened to for quite some time and he actually provided the music for this film.

If you are a fan of rockabilly music and the style, you’ll probably really enjoy this movie. It has a sort of punk edge to it, even though it takes place a few decades before punk rock was even a thing.

You can see where it was inspired by The Wild One, the classic bike film starring Marlon Brando. Yet this still has its own voice and stands strong on its own.

This picture also flows really well with Streets of Fire, where Dafoe plays another rockabilly biker that is a more despicable character than Vance in this film.